Don Delillo - Falling Man

Again she stood and thought. She thought of the language that Rosellen had been using at the last sessions she’d been able to attend, how she developed extended versions of a single word, all the inflections and connectives, a kind of protection perhaps, a gathering against the last bare state, where even the deepest moan may not be grief but only moan.

Do we say goodbye, yes, going, am going, will be going, the last time go, will go.

This is what she was able to recall from the limp script of Rosellen’s last pages.

He walked back through the park. The runners seemed eternal, circling the reservoir, and he tried not to think of the last half hour, with Florence, talking into her silence. This was another kind of eternity, the stillness in her face and body, outside time.

He picked up the kid at school and then walked north into a breeze that carried a faint stir of rain. He was relieved to have something to talk about, Justin’s schoolwork, his friends and teachers.

“Where do we go?”

“Your mother said she’d be walking home from the meeting uptown. We want to intercept her.”

“Why?”

“To surprise her. Sneak up on her. Lift her spirits.”

“How do we know which way she will come?”

“That’s the challenge. A direct route, an indirect route, she’s walking fast, she’s walking slow.”

He was speaking into the breeze, not quite to Justin. He was still back there, with Florence, double in himself, coming and going, the walks across the park and back, the deep shared self, down through the smoke, and then here again to safety and family, to the implications of one’s conduct.

In one hundred days or so, he would be forty years old. This was his father’s age. His father was forty, his uncles. They would always be forty, looking aslant at him. How is it possible that he was about to become someone of clear and distinct definition, husband and father, finally, occupying a room in three dimensions in the manner of his parents?

He’d stood by the window in those last minutes looking at the opposite wall, where a photograph hung, Florence as a girl, in a white dress, with her mother and father.

The kid said, “We go which way? This street or that street?”

It was a picture he’d barely noticed before and the sight of her in that setting, untouched by the consequences of what he’d come to say, caused a tightness in his chest. What she needed in him was his seeming calm, even if she didn’t understand it. He knew she was grateful for this, the fact that he was able to read the levels of her distress. He was the still figure, watching, ever attentive, saying little. This is what she wanted to cling to. But now she was the one who would not speak, watching him by the window, hearing the soft voice that tells her it is ended now.

Understand, he said.

Because what else finally was there to say? He watched the light fall from her face. This was the old undoing that was always near, now come inevitably into her life again, an injury no less painful for being fated.

She stood a moment longer outside the temple. There were voices in the schoolyard up ahead, across the street from the elevated tracks. A crossing guard stood at the corner, arms folded, with sparse traffic along the narrow one-way stretch between the sidewalk and the rampart of scarred stone blocks.

A train flew by.

She walked toward the corner, knowing there would be no message waiting when she got home. It was gone now, the sense that a message would be waiting. Three words. Call me soonest. She’d told Carol not to call unless she could deliver the book in question. There was no book, not for her.

A train went by, southbound this time, and she heard someone call in Spanish.

There was a row of apartment buildings, the projects, situated on this side of the tracks, and when she reached the corner she looked to her right, past the schoolyard, and saw the jutting facade of one wing of a building, heads in windows, half a dozen maybe, up around the ninth, tenth, eleventh floors, and she heard the voice again, someone calling out, a woman, and saw the schoolkids, some of them, pausing in their games, looking up and around.

A teacher walked slowly toward the fence, tall man, swinging a whistle on a string.

She waited at the corner. There were more voices now from the projects and she looked that way again, noting their line of sight. They were looking down at the tracks, northbound side, to a point almost directly above her. Then she saw the students, some of them backing across the yard toward the wall of the school building, and she understood they were trying to get a better view of this side of the tracks.

A car went by, radio blasting.

It took a moment for him to come into view, upper body only, a man on the other side of the protective fence that bordered the tracks. He wasn’t a track worker in a blaze orange vest. She saw that much. She saw him from the chest up and heard the schoolkids now, calling to each other, all the games in suspension.

He seemed to be coming out of nowhere. There was no station stop here, no ticket office or platform for passengers, and she had no idea how he’d managed to gain access to the track area. White male, she thought. White shirt, dark jacket.

The immediate street was quiet. People passing looked and walked and a few stopped, briefly, and others, younger, lingered. It was the kids in the schoolyard who were interested and the faces high to her right, more of them now, floating in the windows of the projects.

White male in suit and tie, it now appeared, as he made his way down the short ladder through an opening in the fence.

This is when she knew, of course. She watched him lower himself to the maintenance platform that jutted over the street, just south of the intersection. This is when she understood, although she’d felt something even before her first glimpse of the figure. There were the faces in the high windows, something about the faces, a forewarning, the way you know something before you perceive it directly. This is who he had to be.

He stood on the platform, about three stories above her. Everything was painted brownish rust, the upper tiers of coarse granite, the barrier he’d just passed through and the platform itself, a slatted metal structure resembling a large fire escape, twelve feet long and six wide, accessible normally to workers on the tracks or those at street level arriving in a maintenance truck equipped with vertical boom and open bucket.

A train went by, southbound again. Why is he doing this, she thought.

He was thinking, not listening. He began to listen as they made their way uptown, talking in brief sprints, and he realized that the kid was using monosyllables again.

He told him, “Cut the crap.”

“What?”

“How’s that for monosyllables?”

“What?”

“Cut the crap,” he said.

“What for? You tell me I don’t talk.”

“That’s your mother, not me.”

“Now I talk, you tell me not to talk.”

He was getting better at this, Justin was, barely pausing between words. At first it was an instructive form of play but the practice carried something else now, a solemn obstinacy, nearly ritualistic.

“Look, I don’t care. You can talk in the Inuit language if you like. Learn Inuit. They have an alphabet of syllables instead of letters. You can speak one syllable at a time. It’ll take you a minute and a half to say one long word. I’m in no hurry. Take all the time you want. Long pauses between the syllables. We’ll eat whale blubber and you can speak Inuit.”

“I do not think I would like to eat whale meat.”

“It’s not meat, it’s blubber.”

“This is the same as fat.”

“Say blubber.”

“This is the same as fat. It is fat. Whale fat.”